Pioneering women in the world of American finance are most often known for their work on Wall Street. In the 19th century, Victoria Woodhull opened the first woman-owned Wall Street brokerage firm; about a century later, in the 1960s, Isabel Benham became the first female partner at a Wall Street bond house while Muriel Siebert became the first woman to buy a seat on the New York Stock Exchange.

But a few years before Benham and Siebert made their ceiling-shattering moves, another woman broke into an old boys’ club of finance — not in New York, but in Chicago. In January 1961, Grace E. Hyslop became the first female member of the Chicago Mercantile Exchange.

For young people walloped by the Great Recession of 2008 and 2009, living with Mom and Dad was one way to adapt to hard times. In more recent years, the economy has improved, including a significant drop in the unemployment rate…but that hasn’t been enough to push many 20-somethings out of the nest.

In the late 1960s, an unusual crisis struck Wall Street. The foe? Paper.

Daily trading volume on the New York Stock Exchange was soaring to new heights, with the average number of shares changing hands more than doubling in just three years. But in this era before automated systems and processing, the Street soon became overwhelmed.

Cheryl Y. Biron helps frozen food, building materials and consumer goods make their way across the country every day, and she does it without leaving her home office. Biron runs One Horn Transportation, a transportation brokerage firm that acts as middle person — Biron pointedly does not say “middleman” — between companies looking to ship goods and the truckers who deliver the merchandise.

Brett Diamond says he was in the right place at the right time. The Long Island native and his business partner, Keith Muller, decided to start a telecommunications business in New Jersey just as high-frequency trading — lightning fast, computerized trading dependent on high-speed data lines — was taking off in the Garden State. Now the company boasts an international network, with an infrastructure consisting of its own fiber-optic cables in New Jersey and lines leased from carriers around the world.

But the success of the Paramus-based Hudson Fiber Network can be traced back to more than luck.

Britney Spears recently revealed she’s going to be taking math classes so she can keep up when her older son learns pre-Algebra … and it’s not just celebs like Spears who need some extra help when it comes to understanding their kids’ school work. Of course, most of us non-famous folk don’t go so far as to return to school just for that reason. (Way to go the extra mile, Brit!) Instead, we turn to everyone’s favorite resource: Google.

I asked parents to tell me what strange, perplexing homework question or issue forced them to seek guidance on the Internet and here’s how they responded.